‘Beast Games' editor Mack Hopkins on the scene that was inspired by ‘Dunkirk'

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Beast Games editor Mack Hopkins wears many hats on Prime Video's blockbuster competition series starring Jimmy 'MrBeast' Donaldson. Hopkins is a cohost and cocreator on the series, which was recently renewed for two more seasons. However, Hopkins, who started his career editing and creating content for YouTube, has his sights set on further horizons.
'My whole life is built around wanting to direct and edit movies, and so my entire style was forced into a box when we went with YouTube,' he says to Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: TV Editors panel. Hopkins says he grew up watching movies with his father and was first inspired by the television series Star Trek to move into editing and filmmaking.
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'My end goal has always been traditional stuff, to be honest. However, I found that YouTube was the best way to reach the top when I was younger. I dropped out of film school to do my first YouTube channel because I thought that maybe there was something to bring to the table with all of this knowledge and graphics and sort of like traditional style, and I think it ended up working out. So now, if Jimmy wants to make a movie, I will be the guy that has helped him before, and it's super awesome that we're in that situation now.'
Beast Games takes some inspiration from Squid Game. However, it's historic in the competition reality space: 1,000 contestants — the most extensive cast for a reality show — compete for a $5 million prize, the largest single cash prize in reality television history. According to Hopkins, the 10-episode series captured so much footage of its contestants and gameplay that it would take two years to watch.
'So being there in person gave me a pretty accurate depiction of how things felt on set without having to scrub through footage,' Hopkins says of the advantage he had as an editor by being an on-air contributor. 'I witnessed things happen, and they made me, as an artist, feel a certain type of way, and so being able to recreate this general vibe of what actually occurred on set and actually what made me feel a certain way in the edit was really cool.'
Hopkins also brought his knowledge of film and his love of the medium to the edit room. For one sequence, when the contestants were required to build structures out of blocks, he noticed the entire room of 1,000 people grew silent and immediately thought of Christopher Nolan.
'The block scene is just straight out of Dunkirk,' he says. 'There's a bombing scene in the film, and it is a very slow riser. There's one part where the riser hasn't reached its peak, and there is silence. Everyone's looking up, and there's this stopwatch — an organic ticking going on. And that is what the scene I'm talking about is. It's just a straight inspiration from Dunkirk. There are a lot of references in the show just based on movies, because that's what my inspiration is. Whether it's Tron with the sets or Terminator 2: Judgment Day, those are the starting points for almost everything creatively in the show, on a post-production standpoint. Everything comes from movies.'
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
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